Lama Tsultrim Allione: Wisdom Rising
The overwhelming success of last year’s Women’s March on Washington demonstrated the rise of the feminine energy in the collective unconscious of humanity. Wisdom Rising. According to Lama Tsultrim Allione, the suppression of the sacred feminine and the loss of feminine qualities are urgent psychological and ecological issues in modern society, and it is only by empowering the sacred feminine and listening to the earth as she tries to communicate with us that we will heal ourselves and the planet.
Lama Tsultrim Allione is a celebrated Buddhist Teacher and Spiritual Activist and the founder and resident Lama of Tara Mandala Retreat Centre in Colorado. She is the author of “Women of Wisdom, “the National Bestseller “Feeding Your Demons – Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict,” which is now translated into twenty languages, and “Wisdom Rising – Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine,” which provides a method for inner transformation and empowerment into wisdom and fierce compassion for all of us – women and men – who want to be a part of the rising awareness and return of the sacred feminine.
Interview with Lama Tsultrim Allione: Wisdom Rising
To listen to the full interview with Lama Tsultrim Allione by Sandie Sedgbeer on the OMTimes Radio Show, What is Going OM, click the player below.
Sandra Sedgbeer: Your life journey has been a far from ordinary one. You were born in New England to an academic publishing family. You traveled to India in your late teens and, in 1970 at the age of just 22, you were ordained as the first American Buddhist Nun. You were also recognized as the reincarnation of a renowned 11th century Tibetan Yogini and became one of only a few female Lamas in the world today. What first attracted you to Tibet and Buddhism?
Lama Tsultrim Allione: I think it was really the mandala that drew me in. I met the mandala on a book cover when I was about 15 years old. My Grandparents lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was in Harvard Square and wandering around and went into a Bookstore and there, on a table in front of me was this book by Carl Jung with a mandala on the cover.
Mandalas are a round, circular shape divided into four quadrants in the center, and the Tibetan mandalas, which are quite elaborate are meditation tools. I didn’t know any of that at the time, and I just looked at this Tibetan mandala on the cover of the book. It was as though I traveled into the mandala there in the bookstore and I thought this is not normal art; something is going on here. I ended up buying the book, and there were other mandalas inside, and also Jung’s discussion of the mandala, and the mandala being found in the Rose Windows in Chartres, and other gothic cathedrals. I literally followed the mandala and went to India and Nepal when I was 19 and met the Tibetan people. I was a painter at the time, and I wanted to paint Tibetan mandalas and learned that it would take probably about a year just to learn how to measure one. That was discouraging, so I didn’t end up doing that. But I did return to Nepal, and I was ordained in January 1970 as the first American Tibetan Buddhist nun.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: When you saw the mandala for the first time, did you feel any sense of recognition?
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: I wouldn’t have known to call it that at the time, but I would say in retrospect, yes, because it was that feeling of I know this, like trying to remember something, but I didn’t even know about past lives at that time. It was more just a feeling of incredible attraction, which continued to be extremely strong when I met the Tibetan people, and it was like a home-sickness that I hadn’t known I had until then.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: In the documentary ‘Feeding Your Demons’ you described yourself as having been quite a wild child. You were always out in nature, riding your ponies, swimming in the lake, and one of your greatest pleasures was to run outside in the middle of a thunderstorm in your swimsuit. That speaks of a personality that revealed in movement and action and yet when you became a nun, you spent four years living in caves and remote retreat huts practicing meditation. How difficult was it for you to adapt what appears to have been a wildly exuberant nature to one of stillness and contemplation?
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: Well, yes, I was wild and very physical as a child, but Tibetan Buddhism has physicality in it, too. For example, the first thing I did was 100,000 prostrations – full-length prostrations which are done with a certain visualization – something that you are reciting, so it’s a meditation, but it is very physical as you slide all the way down flat on your stomach and then back up, and it takes about 20 minutes to do 100. 100,000 of those took me three months doing that non-stop, basically all day. So, yes, there is that aspect of frustration, and there are also yogic practices in Tibetan Buddhism, but I didn’t have any trouble regarding the meditation and the long hours. Meditation for me was fascinating and deep and wide, and I didn’t feel restless or irritated by having to sit there for hours. It felt very full and a kind of inner exploration, so I think it was past lives, and, a sense of ‘I have done this before,’ and once I was exposed to it, it all came back.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: Nonetheless, you yearned to become a mother, and eventually you renounced your vows. How difficult a decision was that, and how did renouncing your vows impact your Buddhist practices?
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: Yes, that was a really difficult decision because I was actually quite happy as a nun, very joyful, and I also felt that if I continued to be a nun, I would be repressing, my sexuality, and that wouldn’t be healthy for me. I also had a longing for children at that point. I talk about it in my first book “Women of Wisdom” how that was a time of being a maiden or a virgin, not literally a virgin but the time for a woman to belong to no man. I’d had boyfriends before, and then I was celibate for that time, and it was good for me to pull out of that whole dynamic and really find myself and center in myself for those years, but then I felt it would become sort of repression if I continued. So that’s why I stopped, but it definitely wasn’t an easy decision to make.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: You subsequently became the mother of four children, one of whom, your daughter Chiara, died at just two-and-a-half months. You wrote that after you lost Chiara you found courage again in female role models and you discovered a way to transform your pain into a path forward. What practice was the most helpful for you?
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: At that point, I was studying a nature of mind practice. It’s the highest level of practice in the Tibetan tradition, so that was helpful, the resting in the nature of mind and then just being present with the grief. I guess you could call it a kind of mindfulness, but bringing myself into the grief rather than trying to escape from it. To honor it and be as present with it as I could be, which is difficult but in a way, it’s the running away from the grief that makes it worse than just actually turning towards it and feeling it.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: In ‘Wisdom Rising’ you teach the mandala of the five Dakinis, a practice which brings together sound, visualization, and meditation to help transform challenging emotions into their wisdom counterparts. Tell us about the Dakinis. Who, or what, are they?
LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE: The Dakinis are embodiments of wisdom in the form of fierce and feminine beings. The word Dakini means Skydancer or She Who Moves Through Space. The Dakini is the most important manifestation of the feminine in Tibetan Buddhism, and she can appear in a lot of different ways. She can appear as a human being or as a deity, as she does in the Dakini mandala; she’s surrounded by flames, naked except for something like a tiger skin and various ornaments, and she’s dancing and fierce. She’s a form of the sacred feminine that we don’t usually see. If we see the sacred feminine at all, we see a female figure usually who is motherly and compassionate and so on, not this fierce, wild manifestation. So, the Dakinis are that, and they’re messengers of spaciousness and emptiness and a force of truth, and one of the things I say in my book is the Dakinis preside over the funeral of self-deception. They have a quality of fierce truth and energy, and they’re often traditionally found in charnel grounds or cemeteries and also appear in visions at dawn or dusk in the twilight time between the worlds. So, it’s a fierce feminine but an enlightened feminine. I think the fierce feminine is something that men particularly have been very afraid of historically so, it’s not something that’s been allowed. The fierce feminine has been the witch or the bitch, and that’s not true in Vajrayana Buddhism. It’s the other aspect of the fierce feminism which, to me, is exciting and important at this time with women rising in their fierceness. They have something they can identify with. It’s fierce compassion. It’s not hatred; it’s turning that anger into activism, and so the Dakinis provide a form of inspiration for what’s happening now for women and their allies.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview of Lama Tsultrim Allione
